"Eloise," I cried, "you know I wouldn't stand for that!"
"No," she whispered softly, "not if you could help. But Jack, I forgot to tell you, you are already out."
I could only look my astonishment.
"I wanted to write you," she went on, "but I was afraid. I learned it all from Braxton Bragg."
"What did he have to do with it?"
"You know he has had a silly idea that he was going to marry me himself some day, though you know how I have always despised him. Well, Jack, you'll never know what he has done; because you don't know the conditions on The Home Stretch. I, myself, didn't, till Braxton Bragg showed me the papers the very month you left. You know how grandfather has always kept that secret drawer in his safe locked? But you remember how we children learned all about it?"
"I remember Braxton showed it to me," I said. "I never knew how he found it out."
"Nor I, nor how he stole the parchment from it, the one that grandfather kept from all eyes, even Aunt Lucretia's, for she knows nothing of it yet. But he did, and he showed it to me, thinking—well, you'll guess why. Jack, we're outcasts, you and I, we have nothing."
She hesitated a moment, then went on. "It seems that the first John Rutherford, the Old Indian fighter, who was killed at New Orleans, left a secret paper with his will, in which he begged the heir who inherited from him, your great-grandfather, John Rutherford, second, who fought in the Mexican war, you know, to bequeath the estate to that son of his who should be a soldier, and that it should be passed on in that way secretly to each generation. Now John Rutherford the second, had only one son, your grandfather, and his son, Braxton's father, was killed in the war.
"Oh, I see now," I said amazed, "and that was why he wanted me to go to West Point."